If we are circumspect in our psychology, we realize that many times we don’t know our own minds.

I am not a meditating ninja. I do not balance, poised to act with clarity.

No, I am clumsy.

In love, I am particularly clumsy.

To speak of such things in America…it just isn’t done.

Love is more taboo than sex.

Sex is ubiquitous, but love is vulnerability.

An American can never show vulnerability.

This is the great archetypal travesty of the film Patton.

And perhaps no greater dichotomy could exist than from that film to our film Elèna et les hommes.

It is Jean Renoir again. It is Ingrid Bergman. It is Jean Marais.

And to a very surprising extent, it is Juliette Gréco.

It must have been this film to which Godard fell in love.

More interested in Gréco than El Greco at this time. More interested in Juliette than his schoolwork.

Those dreams which would be realized in Anna Karina.

But things fall apart.

How hard to know the soul of a man or woman.

Ingrid plays the role of a Polish princess.

On Bastille Day with Mel Ferrer there is a Rabelaisian warmth to the festivities.

From one Renoir to another, there are the pinks in the cheeks. Red wine. A weak drink. Compared to Polish vodka.

And then there are the daisies. A marguerite here and there. Gounod’s Faust would have such as the leading soprano.

A grand opera in five acts is about what Elèna et les hommes feels like.There are similarities in tone and mise-en-scène to Max Ophüls’ Lola Montès, but the best comparison is to Renoir’s own The Golden Coach.

What may not be evident (due to the visual disparity between the vibrant, saturated colors of Elèna et les hommes and the black and white of Renoir’s early films) is that our film is very similar to the Renoir classic La Règle du jeu. Both share traits with the elusive Hollywood genre known as “screwball comedy”. There is a general ruckus of celebration…a confusion of who loves whom…indeed, about who should love whom…mixed emotions…missed connections…conflicted hearts.

There are the base buffoons who live out our easiest desires. They just chase. So what if they lose? Well, it makes a big difference…from the bathos of Schumacher to the stoogery of Eugène.

But these references aside, it is the others who make us believe. The hesitating class of Ingrid Bergman and Nora Gregor…these parallel characters. And the luckless chaps who may or may not prevail in the end…Mel Ferrer and, indeed, Jean Renoir himself as Octave in La Règle du jeu.

It must have been a revelation for Godard to see this film. It was the French film industry asserting itself. And yet, it was the spectacle against which Debord would rail a mere 11 years later.

Even so, Elèna et les hommes is (at the very least) a beautiful echo of the French film tradition which preceded it. In a sense, it was Jean Renoir retelling that old story of La Règle du jeu one more time.

Life is a strange party in which Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre is liable to be conjured from the ghostly ivories of a player piano at any moment.

I’ve wanted to say that for a long time. I’ve said it before. But it looks better in writing.

It has a sort of permanence to it. Yet we never know.

Why the non sequitur expletive? Because this film is a brilliant expletive deleted.

Long ago…in a galaxy…in OUR galaxy, as a matter of fact,

there were some clever blokes (?) who called themselves the Dziga-Vertov Group.

Chief among them, of course, was Jean-Luc Godard.

But it is telling that he wanted his celebrity subsumed by something greater than himself.

Ach, Gott! Fuck this. I have caught myself slipping into a routine voice.

A routine voice will tell you nothing about this film.

And so we come to the crux of this experiment: struggle.

Film is a struggle between images and sounds.

In a Godard film, even images struggle amongst themselves in a feeding frenzy.

It is a manifestation of a mind trying to process the unfathomable complexity of the world.

In the film under review, it is especially the sounds which cannibalize one another.

But this is not new in Godard films. Always, ALWAYS…there is a plethora of content.

Like a honey ant ready to explode.

[ ] Space left intentionally blank.

Analogous to paragraph.

If you are thinking poetry,

you are not far off.

We miss the mark daily. It is not a Christian confession.

There is not a way to look over the summary to this film on Wikipedia.

In that sense, I am offering a service.

Yet, I am giving you a very subjective, personal impression of this film.

I write film criticism which strives to harmonize with each individual film under consideration.

In other words, each film must be reviewed differently.

There really isn’t, despite a tendency to the contrary towards generalization, such thing as

a film like all the rest.

Yet I have my patois. My schtick.

Take it or leave it.

Only know that the message is under continually scrutiny.

Self-criticism of film criticism in a controlled system seeking to explain it all.

If you are looking for the answer to the question,

“Who’s in control?,”

the answer is,

“No one’s in control.”

I’m sure my friends at the CIA will agree with me on this.

To clarify, I have no friends at the CIA (that I know of).

Speaking sequentially and descriptively with deference to “plot” is useless here.

We have lost the plot. [Thank God!]

And so a guitar can change he world.

And some extremely-advanced students can change some Beatles lyrics (months after The White Album was released).

You must struggle in the mud. Mud and blood. Le sable et le sang. Rimbaud.

I failed miserably.

And she was hoisted into the air on a Panavision boom.

Nude ascending a staircase.

This just in…THREE LEVELLERS SHOT BY CROMWELL IN BURFORD…

ORIOLES DEFEAT WHITE SOX IN BOURGEOIS VACUUM

Ah,…now I am weeping for the revolution…or for the auteur.

But the auteur has given us a lasting oeuvre.

Was Truffaut’s only English-language film Fahrenheit 451?

It matters. Here. …et ailleurs.

I am weeping for the old auteur…before he’s even gone.

And next I will view but not review.

Solely my own experience. To remember where I started. (which is basically where I am at this very second)

I have not moved an inch.

It is essential to see British Sounds. To hear British Sounds.

As an English speaker. In April 2015. You won’t even need the Italian subtitles.

They are telling us we are losers. THEY they.

I have no message. “Too many messages.” –Harry Partch

I am just floating on the waves of free association.

Go on: call me an amateur.

A lover , not a fighter…who didn’t claw his way up to gargle in the rat-race choir.

He lives. Let me check.

He lives.

Regardless.

And we have no way of communicating with our fellow man. The life sucked out of the 21st century.

This is by design.

“Separation is the alpha and the omega of the spectacle.” –Guy Debord

I present the conspiratorial view of history applied to cinema.

Paranoid nonfiction. I have never read Dick.

Quicker than you can say Jack Robinson. The difficulties.

Such a quintessentially British euphemism.

The Troubles. Northern Ireland.

We know nothing. It’s not as easy as shot/reverse/shot.

It’s like the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ).

KGB calling it a CIA false flag.

Need we remind the perceptive reader of world history that Dr. Ewen Cameron was being paid by the CIA to carry out hideous psychiatric experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute on the grounds of McGill University in Montreal as part of Project MKUltra over a period of time which overlapped with the activities of the FLQ? That is established fact and not a conjecture with which the KGB had any connection.

And so the question becomes, as Godard and co-director Jean-Henri Roger ask, [to paraphrase] “Is Marx the best weapon with which to confront the situation before us?”

Baltimore is haunted by the past (capitalism). China is haunted by the present (vestigial communism). In America there is no present moment (minus the times when reality erupts within the spectacle). In China there is no past. Not really. It is forbidden. Communism requires the primacy of the present moment. History is history. Gone. Capitalism requires the continuation of the past. Inheritance. Both suffer from the status quo. Capitalism is no longer capitalism…and communism is no longer communism. The great irony is that monopoly capitalism and totalitarian socialism are no longer easily distinguishable (if they ever were). Why more people don’t seek out the power elite of this two-sided conspiracy coin is beyond me.

Fear. Fear prevents us. Only the dispossessed have what is called courage. Rage. Courage.

You ask who died. And who didn’t. Warren Buffett. Charity golf and tennis tournament. Offutt AFB. Morning of 9/11. Nerve center of American nuclear deterrent. We know one WTC CEO who didn’t die because she was invited. Who else was on that list???

I hear the whispers of a young, balding man. Torn in half by war. Risking it all. To edit a film about the Palestinians. And the film lab is bombed. A scare tactic. How dare you support those Muselmanns? Muselmensch.

Disproportionate riposte. Flip script. ABC

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1:27 AM

Louis Le Prince – Wikipedi…

Add Media.

Two sentences. I overlooked a period.

Lumumba and Rousseau.

Freud is the head and Marx is the sex. Theory and practice.

Give him enough rope. …

Derrida sideways.

It is the brilliance of the little boy–the touching presence of the crusty old beggar.

In school we learned about Nietzsche, but no one ever told me about Jack Nitzsche.

She keeps dozing off. Tap tap. Perks up. Dozes. Again prodded. But when she slumps left (her left)…a caress. It works the same. She opens her eyes. More painful-eyes studying. Some sleep with one eye open. I read until only one eye cooperates. And then no eyes. Off to processing sleep.

Mao was still prominent. But this is where the great art of montage was first born…continued and epitomized in Histoire(s) du cinema. 3.8/5. My ass. Rotten tomatoes…Léolo.

Here. Ici. Godard=Picasso=Joyce. It may start with an Élie Faure quote concerning Velázquez, but that is just to set the stage for this ball of colored glass which goes beyond cinema. The politics come on stronger, but they are like that strangely succinct Butthole Surfers lyric about not giving a fuck about the FBI…or the CIA.

You must only dial M. Two murders by scissor. Furthermore, the only way to catch a thief might be in his fireworks. The tears of a clown…Clyde and his Bonnie…I can’t even keep track of their casual carnage. Two? 3? One thing is for sure: the excitement of Breathless returns…along with the high school musical version of Broadway…in a bare apartment…a girl and a shitload of guns. That’s all you need for this film. And a car. The spirit of Gene Kelly emerges later to spiff up the surreal song moments.

Pierrot doesn’t drive off a cliff. But he drives right into the sea. Yes, books were Pierrot’s downfall. He’s never gonna get that job at Standard Oil. Especially since he skipped town with a smokin’-hot murderer. Drive all night. Fuck it! I’m so sick of everyone. I just want to do what I want. You know, just get in your car and start driving. Find a town somewhere and start a whole new life.

Enid Coleslaw would doubtless have a certain simpatico with our lovers Marianne and Ferdinand (Pierrot [Belmondo]). But this paradise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A parrot, a fox, sure…but eating out of tin cans…Marianne, like Groucho Marx, wants some hot-cha-cha! And so the dance hall in town. It could be L’Atalante. It could be Casque d’Or. Why are the police not here yet? Because they like to let people destroy themselves. Victor Hugo meets Dostoyevsky.

More torture à laLe Petit Soldat. Use the whore’s dress. Polyester. An especially nasty asphyxiation. And so Ferdinand ends up back in the bathtub…where he started. Instead of reading the history of modern art to his daughter, he has just outed his lover. What a terrible 5:00 pm. What a terrible 5:00 pm. What a terrible 5:00 pm.

Maybe I will just let the train pulverize me. Why is it always damsels in distress? Damoiseau?

Ah, but it all makes so much sense in the end. Raymond Devos sums it up. That tune that’s always been playing. It is our comedic, pathetic love life. Yes, she betrayed us. And so he fails to not commit suicide.

A failed failure is a success. I’ve always had trouble spelling that word. I blame Bob Dylan. There is no k in success. And though I long embraced suckcess, I now remove the k and a c comes with it. Sucess. I have unsuccessfully spelled success. As a graduate student. In business.

Ah, but it’s really no use. One must stay optimistic. Realistic. Let’s face it: the chances are slim. It takes a lot to laugh. Hear that lonesome whistle blow. Maybe tomorrow Bob Dylan. Suckcess in all its glory.